Hey Alan!
There is a Houston netsquared meetup every month:
http://netsquared.meetup.com/3/events/
Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 7:00 PM
One note about "service" integration... CiviCRM will provide a stable service--
probably SOAP-- when there is a demand for it... right now Plone would be the first
demand for it. If folks started to work on Plone/CiviCRM integration, they can expect the
stable service to be a change the CiviCRM team would make to accommodate the integration.
But first someone needs to work on it.
If you want to find out more about the forthcoming CiviCRM 1.5 release
(includes CiviMember membership management), we have a skypecast this week:
CiviCRM Community Skypecast
Starts July 06, 12:00 PST
https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=14540
david
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2006 16:08:22 +0000 (UTC)
From: alan runyan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [NGO] Re: Plone/CiviCRM
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> My name is David Geilhufe, I'm the managing partner of CivicSpace and one of
the founders of the CiviCRM open
> source project.
Hi David!
Any idea when the next NGO mixer will be happening in the Houston area?
> A couple months ago we sat down with Alan Runyan at Enfold and reviewed our
APIs and integration
> architecture to verify CiviCRM could be integrated with Plone.
Yes. I had a few brief emails. Unfortunately I didnt have enough time to sit
down with the CTO from your organization. After my experiences of integrating
with democracy in action (deminaction at the cheeseshop) --
I learned quite a bit.
> Might be a good opportunity to integrate Plone with a fully
internationalized and localized CRM designed for NGO needs.
I agree. I would love for Plone/CivicCRM to have a integration.
> To date, no one has shown interest in providing NGOs integrated
functionality
with CiviCRM/Plone, though
> we are happy to provide support to anyone that wants to
spearhead the integration.
The only 'integration' point that was claimed 'stable' was using PHP api's
which are a layer around the relational database structure. Plone is written
in Python. So the obvious mechanism to integrate would be to read/write
directly against the RDBMS. This is a start! But I dont like this approach.
IMHO, the better way would be to integrate as though CivicCRM was a 'service'.
i.e. REST, XMLRPC, SOAP, etc. This way the RDBMS structure can change and
does not impact client code.
Finally - whoever writes the python code *must* write loads of doctests.
Democracy in Action integration uses REST style HTTP/XML and they break
things occassionally. I would imagine their RDBMS structure changes all
the time. NOTE: DIA is a commercial venture not a open code project.
But still. Our doctests give us protection/coverage against such breakage.
We run the tests every night. I suggest this approach towards CivicCRM
integration.
Big questions (from my point of view):
- When will CivicCRM have a service based integration point? i.e. all the
functionality that that PHP interface provides will be exposed via
HTTP/SOAP/etc?
- It doesnt have to be 100% service coverage of php interface. just
significant so you can do 80% of the work.
- If someone is willing to write a python api against their RDBMS - go for it!
and put it in the cheeseshop, http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi
In summary, if someone wants to team with civiccrm; we could do so and get
mileage immediately. providing a client api around their rdbms structure.
a longer term approach would be for civiccrm to land a supported stable
service-oriented web api. Last I understood the "web service" side of
civiccrm was for their mail integration; it didnt cover very much compared
to what could be done with php interface.
cheers
alan runyan
_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
